Hey guys! I'm a soundtrack composer and sound engineer. I'm sort of hoping to use this game as practice and a testing ground for sound design when I get bored... I'd like to eventually have this game completely re-scored and create all new sound effects from the ground up.

But I'm having a bit of trouble getting started, and after a lot of searching I really haven't been able to find a good answer...

(I'm on mac, by the way)
So I can get as far as opening/extracting the .pk3 files, finding all the audio locations I need and replacing the sounds. That's about where my progress ends. I've tried compressing the data folder back to a .pk3 file (which is really the only answer I've been able to find) and nothing seems to work, the game only opens up to a screen telling me that the .pk3 file that I edited is missing.

Any advice here would be greatly appreciated! I assume there's some kind of code I have to change, or extra program I have to use when editing these .pk3 folders? I even looked through the rest of the game's files, one of the text documents mentioned an "extras" folder with all the extra programs you need for editing... and that folder doesn't seem to exist.

I'd really like to get this working so I can really dig into re-designing all the sound and music. I'm definitely gonna share the progress with the community as I go along (even though I'm sure this game doesn't have a massive playerbase, but still... it's all for fun and practice).

But you do not have to replace the sound files inside the pk3 file. Instead you can overwrite it by placing the sound file inside your userdir ($HOME/.xonotic/)
That means a file inside the pk3 file, e.g.
Xonotic/data/xonotic-data.pk3/sound/ctf/bluecapture.ogg
can be overwritten by
~/.xonotic/data/sound/ctf/bluecapture.ogg

This also works by placing pk3 files inside your userdir, as long the paths within the pk3 match.

But you do not have to replace the sound files inside the pk3 file. Instead you can overwrite it by placing the sound file inside your userdir ($HOME/.xonotic/)
That means a file inside the pk3 file, e.g.
Xonotic/data/xonotic-data.pk3/sound/ctf/bluecapture.ogg
can be overwritten by
~/.xonotic/data/sound/ctf/bluecapture.ogg

This also works by placing pk3 files inside your userdir, as long the paths within the pk3 match.

Got it working! Just extracting the "sound" folder to the "data" folder overwrites the sounds. Awesome, now all my changes are in-game. Thanks, man!